A New Year of Crafting & Project #1 - Mini Doll Tote

I've been missing taking the time to be creative lately, so I'm making some simple goals to enjoy the creative process again.

My crafting goals for the year:
1. Complete about 1 project per week.
2. Use supplies I already have or can repurpose from other items.
3. Involve our daughter and teach her how to sew. She is one crafty girl and lights up when she completes a project and amazes us with her resourcefulness (many of her projects start with a trip to the recycle bin to forage for supplies).

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Project #1 - American Girl Mini-Doll Tote / Sleeping Case

This past Christmas we gave our girl an American Girl Mini-Doll which she has really enjoyed. One evening I was motivated to sew and made this little case for her to put the doll in for travel or just storing the doll in.

Materials:
Placemat
scrap of fleece
twill tape or ribbon
thread

Time:
10-20 minutes

Start with a placemat. The stiff nature of a double-sided placemat provides a nice weight and durability for the finished project. I had a placemat in my crafting stash (50 cents or $1.00 on clearance several years ago).


1. Cut the placemat to half its width. You'll only be using one half for this project.
The raw edge that you have created is now the bottom of the tote. Because 3 sides of your placemat piece are finished and fleece does not fray, you'll end up with nice edges without any extra effort.
2. Cut a scrap piece of fleece the width of the placemat piece and about 2 inches shorter than the height of the placemat piece.
3. Turn over a small edge along the width of the fleece and hem, using a decorative stitch if you want.
4. Lay the fleece and pieces together, right sides together. Sew together along the bottom (raw) edge of the placemat.
5. Turn the fleece over so that now the fleece and placemat piece are wrong sides together.
6. Pin your pieces of twill tape or ribbon to each side, sandwiched between the fleece and placemat piece.
7. Sew, from bottom to top, to secure the fleece to the placemat piece, also securing the tie on each side.
8. Mark the center of your tote and sew a vertical line to divide the fleece into two pockets.

9. Put the doll in, tie it up and you're good to go.
This will hold 2 mini-dolls with room to spare.

With the other half of the placemat that I set aside at the beginning of the project I made a potholder by folding over the remaining piece, putting in a couple layers of batting and sewing around the edge of the whole thing, sandwiching the ends of a loop of twill tape inside the seam to create a loop so it could be hung.

1 project down, 51 to go. I'm looking forward to getting back to sewing and crafting.